The present disclosure relates generally to portable electronic devices including touch screen display devices and a method of enabling input comprising diacritic characters on a handheld electronic device.
Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and can provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices can include several types of devices including mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless PDAs, and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities. These devices run on a wide variety of networks from data-only networks such as Mobitex and DataTAC to complex voice and data networks such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS and CDMA2000 networks.
Portable electronic devices such as PDAs or smart telephones are generally intended for handheld use and ease of portability. Smaller devices are generally desirable for portability. A touch screen display or a keyboard for input and output is particularly useful on such handheld devices as such handheld devices are small and are therefore limited in space available for user input and output devices. Further, the screen content such as the plurality of operations associated with a particular key on the touch screen display devices are modified depending on the functions and operations being performed. However, these devices are limited in efficiently rendering content for user interaction, for example, displaying the plurality of diacritic characters that are associated with a particular key.
Improvements in a more efficient display of characters are therefore desirable.